I was completely shocked to see that Donny’s immediate family—little brother, mother, father, and grandparents—were sitting off to the side behind a black mesh screen. I could barely make out their features. They were grieving separately from the rest of us. I was boggled. How do people grieve if they’re not grieving with the entire community? How do they grieve in a separate room? I didn’t doubt the epic size of their pain. I didn’t judge the quality of their grief. I was simply baffled by their ceremonies. That was the first time I truly understood that I was a foreigner. I might have been indigenous to the land itself, but I was a first-generation cultural immigrant to the United States. I was now living in a place where people did not grieve like me. Later, back at school, I was even more shocked to learn that it was the first funeral that most of my classmates had ever attended. Donny Piper was their first death. I thought they were kidding. But, no, it was true. My white classmates knew very little about death. We didn’t keep a tally, but based on the stories I remember from that day, I think I might have attended more funerals than all of my white classmates put together.
Later that week, the teacher asked me to take attendance while she left the room for other business.
I quickly ran through the names, A through O, and then I said, “Donny Piper.”
The room was so quiet.
“Donny Piper?” I asked. “Donny?”
I was oblivious to my mistake.
“Donny?” I asked. “Are you here?”
And then I realized that I’d been waiting for a response from my dead friend. So ashamed, so hurt, I put my head down on my desk and wept. Nobody said a word. Not then or later. None of the people in that classroom ever mentioned that incident to me. I was not reprimanded, teased, or consoled. I was left alone to feel my own emotions. So I cried for a few minutes, sat up, and finished taking roll.
A year earlier, on that day after my sister’s burial, I sat at my desk and wondered how I would ever be happy without my sister in my life. She was the only one who’d ever thought I’d be a writer. I scoffed at the notion.
“Indians don’t write books,” I said. And, as far as I knew, Indians did not write books. I wasn’t handed a book written by an Indian until a decade after my sister died.
In fourth grade, I wrote a Halloween story for my sister. I don’t have a copy of that story, but I remember one line: “As the skeletons boned up the stairs, their bones sounded like powwow bells.” Yes, I repeated “bones.” Yes, I used “bones” as a noun and verb. My sister screamed when she read that.
“Junior,” she said to me. “How do you think of shit like that?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I just close my eyes and I see things with my brain.”
“You should write a whole book,” she said.
I laughed at that crazy idea.
I was surely not thinking about a writing career as I sat in that eighth-grade classroom a day after my sister’s burial. I was probably wondering why the hell I was going to school with so many white kids, so many strangers.
And then Barb walked into the room, saw me sitting at my desk, and gasped. She ran to me, hugged me so tightly that I coughed, and then knelt in front of me.
“You’re alive,” she said.
“What?” I asked, confused.
“I heard you died.”
“No,” I said. “My sister died.”
“I didn’t hear ‘Sherman’s sister died,’” she said. “I only heard ‘Sherman died.’”
I didn’t know what to say.
Barb grabbed my hand and said, “I am so sad your sister died. And I am so happy you are alive. I like you. Everybody likes you.”
She hugged me again. Then other girls—Pam, Rachel, Tiffany, and both Lisas—also hugged me.
I had only known those girls for a few months. I think I was probably too shy to hug them back. But they hugged me. And Barb’s words echoed in my ears.
Barb’s words still echo.
My sister was dead. I was mostly a stranger in that school. I would become good friends with most of those kids. And most of those friendships went into suspended animation when we graduated from high school. I remain lifelong friends with a few of those kids, who are now middle-aged adults like me.
But I think I have only seen Barb twice in the last thirty-one years. And yet I often think of her. She was the first person to ever look at me—to sincerely make eye contact—and say, “I like you.”
And I am still flabbergasted that she also said, “Everybody likes you.”
That next year, on our first day as freshmen, I was unanimously elected class president. Donny Piper would die later that school year. But, on that day, he raised his hand and voted for me.
I am weeping now as I write this, as I remember that morning.
I was sitting at a desk and watched all of my classmates—white people—raise their hands to vote for me.
Those forty-nine raised arms turned that classroom into an odd garden. And I proudly stood. And I bloomed.
79.
The Game
BUT, THIRTY-SIX years after those white conservative kids in Reardan unanimously elected me freshman-class president, I wonder how many of them voted for the racist, sexist, homophobic, and immoral Donald Trump to be United States president. How many of their parents and siblings voted for Trump? How many of my former teachers voted for Trump?
Reardan High School is located in Lincoln County, the whitest and most conservative county in Washington. Trump won 72 percent of the Lincoln County vote, so I assume that percentage holds true among my former Reardan classmates and their families who still live in the area. Based on my anonymous looks at their social-media postings, I also assume that percentage holds true, or close to true, for those people who moved away from Reardan to Spokane, Seattle, Alaska, Arizona, Montana, Idaho, Oregon, New York, and various other places.
Of the dozens of Reardan folks I still know, I am aware of only five who are vocal and active Democrats.
How do I make sense of this? How is it possible that I, the lifelong indigenous liberal, became so popular—so loved and loving—in that conservative community? How did I become captain of the basketball team, prom royalty, and president of the Future Farmers of America?
Was it because I had a killer jump shot and spin move on the basketball court?
Was it because I was once handsome and slender enough to be called pretty despite all my real and perceived scars?
Was it because I could publicly speak my mind with quick wit and honesty?
Was it because I was so book-smart?
Was it because I was mostly kind and egalitarian and made friends with stoners, jocks, musicians, geeks, brainiacs, and all other manner of kids? Was it because many of those kids, like me, were athletic and geeky and academically ambitious all at the same time?
My senior year, the varsity basketball team had an average GPA of 3.76. Out of the twelve guys on that team, eleven of us went on to get bachelor’s degrees. The women’s basketball team had that same level of academic accomplishment. This kind of scholarly achievement might be standard for an urban private school, but it seems improbable for a farm-town public high school of a hundred and fifty kids in a community of fifteen hundred people.
So perhaps I was the beneficiary of a white small town’s honest meritocracy. I was good at everything that a Reardan kid was supposed to be good at—I could have simultaneously been portrayed as the nerd hero and compassionate jock in a 1980s teen movie—so maybe that made my indigenous and liberal identities of secondary importance to those white kids and their parents. But I wonder if my race would have been more of an issue if I’d been a nonathlete. If I’d been only an average student. If I’d been plain or overweight or socially awkward. Or if I hadn’t been such a natural diplomat.
I was the best, or among the best, in the school at nearly every academic and extracurricular activity (though I never did repair that small engine in shop class and yes, yes, I twice set myself o
n fire while arc welding), so it was demonstrably impossible for anybody in Reardan to think of me as inferior to any of those white kids.
I think I overwhelmed most overt or latent racism with the sheer force and size of my abilities.
But was I also accepted because it’s difficult to be actively racist, sexist, or homophobic on a one-to-one basis? It’s hard to be anti-Indian when an Indian is sitting next to you in a classroom. Though I did learn it’s pretty easy for a white conservative father and mother to be vocally anti-Indian when their daughter is dating a rez boy like me.
But, damn, after high school and college, and a decade into my very public and leftist artistic career, the town of Reardan asked me to be the grand marshal for their Community Day parade. I said yes, of course, and proudly rode on a mule-driven wagon through town while waving at so many of my old friends and teachers. How did that happen? How did all of those future Trump voters—all of those folks willing to validate and empower that rich man’s bigotry—come to celebrate the poor brown boy who grew up in their white town?
I know the answer has a lot to do with basic human decency, and also with the seductive nature of fame, but I think the answer has most to do with compartmentalism. It’s easy for a white racist to fall in love with and accept one member of a minority—one Indian—and their real and perceived talents and flaws. But it’s much tougher for a racist to accept a dozen Indians. And impossible for a white racist to accept the entire race of Indians—or an entire race of any nonwhite people.
I would guess, perhaps too optimistically, that nearly every racist believes it is morally wrong to be racist. And since nearly every person thinks of themselves as being moral, then a racist must consciously and subconsciously employ tortured logic in order to explain away their racism—in order to believe themselves to be nonracist.
I have lost track of the number of times a white person, hilariously thinking they were being complimentary, has said to me, “But, Sherman, I don’t think of you as an Indian.”
Throughout my rural and urban life, among white conservatives and white liberals, I’ve heard many other variations on that same basic sentiment.
“Sherman, you’re not like other Indians.”
“Sherman, you’re a credit to your race.”
“Sherman, you barely seem Indian.”
“Sherman, I don’t think of you as being Indian. I think of you as being a person.”
“Sherman, you’re not just a Native writer. You’re a writer.”
“Sherman, I don’t see color. I see the person inside.”
All of these statements mean the same thing: “Sherman, in order to fit you and your indigenous identity into my worldview, I have to think of you as being like me—as being white like me.”
I suspect that some of my white friends, if they are reading this, don’t recognize themselves as a person who has said racist things directly to me—who cannot even recognize the racism present in such statements.
In being friends with white people, I’ve always had to live entirely inside their circle of experience—inside their white world. And my white friends have rarely, if ever, spent even a moment in my indigenous world. This inequality in my friendships has a lot to do with my own introverted nature; I am far more emotionally available when performing onstage and in the books I write than I am in person. But it happens mostly because “being American” means “being white,” even for a brown boy like me.
So, at Reardan High School, I was successful and acceptable and loved because I was—and still am—great at negotiating with whiteness. But that means my white friends often mistakenly believe that my ability to successfully negotiate the white world means that I am white—or more white than Native. My white friends can mistakenly believe that my intellectual and artistic abilities are intrinsically white. And, yes, I am heavily influenced by Whitman, Dickinson, Springsteen, Hank Williams, and Dusty Springfield—and owe them and many other white and non-Native artists and intellectuals a huge debt—but I am also very much a product of my ancient tribal culture. I am the genetic, artistic, and political descendant of my mother and father, and grandmother, and thousands of years of salmon-fishing ancestors.
But here I must also indict the strange anti-Indian racism of many Native Americans who have, over my nearly-twenty-five-year literary career, sought to discount, discredit, and demolish me as a writer and as an indigenous person. These are the Natives who, like white racists, mistakenly attribute my success to my perceived whiteness. These are the Natives who cannot believe that a reservation-raised boy could ever become the man I am.
A few years into my career, and in the early, less universal age of the Internet, a rumor started that I wasn’t a real Indian—that I was actually adopted and raised by a white family. Of course, that falsehood was primarily a grievous insult to those indigenous people, like one of my first cousins, who were taken from their birth families and given to white folks—an act of bureaucratic genocide so commonplace that the U.S. government needed to pass the Indian Child Welfare Act in order to stop the practice. But this mythology about white parentage was told about me, a Native man who grew up with two Native parents on his tribe’s reservation in a government-built house located across the street from the tribal school. If my wholly indigenous identity can be viewed with suspicion—in the past, present, and future—then I sigh and grieve at the heinous shit that other Natives endure because they have a white parent or grew up in the city or fail to meet some other imaginary standard of Indianness.
And I laugh when I think about my wife, Diane, a Hidatsa/Ho-Chunk/Potawatomi, who called her sister after our first date and said, “He’s way young and way rez.”
And I think of the continent-sized leap I took in my early teens when I left the reservation school to attend Reardan.
I was a courageous explorer, scholarly adventurist, and terrified child. And none of you, Native or not, would have ever heard of me if I had not taken that first step onto the moon. I have been harshly judged by other Natives who were either too scared to take that step or who somehow think their first step was more pure—more Indian—than mine.
What does it feel like to experience such hypocritical anger from other Natives? Well, if dealing with white anti-Indian racists is like soft-shoeing through a minefield, then facing anti-Indian Indians is like dodging bullets from camouflaged snipers, sneaky and deadly.
But very few of even the most cruel Indians voted for Trump. So I must recall the ways in which my race, and my indigenous identity, did become problematic when I attended Reardan High School and spent five years in Trump Country.
I remember how my parliamentary-procedure-team coach and teammates sometimes called me Chief Gayfeather. And, yes, that’s an obviously racist and homophobic insult, but it was also, impossibly enough, an affectionate acknowledgment and gentle mocking of my Native American identity and highly emotive personality. In high school, as now, I cried more easily than most people. I wrote poems and stories. I constantly expressed my love for people, places, and things. I was affectionate. So, when viewed through the hypermasculine lens of white small-town America, my emotional vulnerability was sometimes perceived as being stereotypically homosexual. One would think that an androgynous Indian boy would be tortured in a farm-town high school, but I was the androgynous and popular Indian boy who led that debate team to a state championship and made out with two of my female teammates, separately, while on road trips to debate meets. I would love to say I also made out with one of my male teammates, because it would make for a more dynamic story, but alas, I’ve always been approximately 84 percent straight.
Chief Gayfeather! I’m sure that shit would get students suspended and teachers fired in Reardan today. But it was acceptable in the 1980s. In some sad-ass spasm of self-denigration and self-preservation, I accepted that shit, too.
I also remember a basketball game we played against Freeman High School where I recognized one of the refs as we did warm-up drills. He had been, f
or years, notoriously and obviously biased against reservation-high-school teams. And though I was the only Native on my team and my parents were the only Native fans sitting in the bleachers, I knew that ref would still practice his official form of anti-Indian racism on me.
So I told my coach, a white man, of my suspicions about that racist ref.
I don’t think my coach believed me. But that ref called a foul on me during the opening jump ball, then called two more fouls on me in the next two minutes, and then called the fourth and fifth fouls on me. The Freeman coach had understood what was happening and had ordered his players to purposely run into me and flop like soccer players.
I was sitting on the bench, disqualified by fouls, before the fourth quarter.
After the game, which my team won without me, my coach pulled me aside in the locker room and said he was sorry about what happened.
He didn’t directly call it racism. But he tacitly acknowledged it.
I also remember a Future Farmers of America extemporaneous speech contest where three judges ruled that I’d either won first or second place while the fourth judge put me in sixth and last place. Her strange decision, and low score, meant I finished in third place and missed out on a trip to the state finals, because only the top two finishers moved on.
Afterward, we looked at her scorecard and saw that she’d deducted points for my “long hair” and “distracting foreign accent.” Well, my hair was not quite as short as my competitors’ crew cuts, but my singsong speaking voice could only be considered foreign if one thinks the Spokane Indian Reservation is an international destination.
I also remember when an adult community member in Reardan publicly objected to me being named basketball team captain. He said, in my presence, that only a “local boy” should be captain. I wish I’d been rowdy enough to point out that I’d been local for at least forty-five thousand years. This is the same guy who, after he read my novel about my first year in Reardan, wrote me to ask why I had to invent racist white characters.